We Win... Because You Didn't

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"There are some fights you just can't win. A force can be so overwhelming that no tactical approach in a fight is going to lead to a victory worth having. When you can't win in a fight, sometimes you have to settle for making sure that if you lose,everyoneloses. It works for nuclear weapons; it works for me."

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The trope of We Win... Because You Didn't, or the "Antietam Defense" or the "Thermopylae Strategy", occurs in a situation where the objective is not to win outright, but rather to deny victory to the opposing party.

A rebel faction and an imperial faction face off over a particular resource. It does not matter who is attacking or defending, but the end result is that the rebel faction destroys the resource, denying it to the imperials/others. Thus, even though the rebels do not have it either, they can claim victory because the imperials did not obtain the resource, regardless of losses suffered by the rebels (similarly, the imperials might be able to claim victory since, while they're powerful enough to ignore the loss of the resource, the rebels are put at a disadvantage by failing to capture it).

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Another version of this trope would be where one side holds the field despite superior losses, and can then gain something by this act, or where another side loses the field, but causes superior losses and gains, say, time by this act. This does not apply if one team leaves with fewer losses, but gains nothing by the battle.

When claiming victory in this manner, a faction must be looking at long-term objectives. Since in the short term the conflict was a stalemate, the participants instead must look ahead and figure out what they can or can't do as a result of the lack of progress.

In the end, this trope is primarily a mentality, because both sides of a conflict can view this as true for their side. For instance, the imperials in the above example can also use this trope because they forced the rebels to deny themselves the resource, all losses ignored, which drastically harms rebel efforts from the imperial perspective.

Examples:

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Anime/Manga

The point of Negi and Rakan's fight in Mahou Sensei Negima! wasn't really to actually win, since Rakan isn't a bad guy. The point was to go be able to go all out and truly measure himself. The battle itself is a tie and only that because Rakan held back a little in the beginning to give him time to start testing his new moves. But the point was made that he's a match for Fate or even better now plus his enslaved students were freed.

Also pertinent to the trope is that Rakan was impressed enough with Negi's performance that he claimed a loss after the fact and gave him the other half of the prize money.

Tet in No Game No Life, is the God of Play and the God of the whole world. However, he only got the job and the power to overwrite free will itself because all the other Gods killed each other fighting amongst themselves. None of them won, so he did by default.

In Runaways, the team's victory against the Gibborim boils down to this. None of them are able to truly harm the Gibborim, who are huge and powerful, but they manage to prevent the Gibborim from collecting a soul that they desperately need in order to stay alive, and thus the Gibborim fade away.

Lampshaded in In the Kingdom's Service when Oobleck claims that Jaune bested the Atlas Special Forces agent he fought. Even though she won their fight handily and Jaune was only saved by Cinder's arrival, neither's goal was to beat the other. The agent's goal was to recover the stolen Paladin and Jaune's was to stop her (as part of an undercover mission). Since she was forced to retreat, she lost and Jaune won.

In Pokémon Reset Bloodlines, when Ash faces Giovanni for his Earth Badge, the Team Rocket boss makes it clear that in the event of a tie he's not under obligation to give him the badge, making it clear that Ash has to get a clear victory to earn it. It becomes a moot point as Ash does manage to defeat him in a full battle, earning the badge.

Film

Demonstrated on a small scale in Thank You for Smoking when the protagonist demonstrates this as a debate strategy to his son, using a comparison of ice cream flavors as an example.

Joey: But you didn't prove that vanilla was the best.

Nick: I didn't have to. I proved that you're wrong, and if you're wrong, I'm right.

Joey: But you still didn't convince me.

Nick: I'm not after you. I'm after them. [points at passers by]

Applies to any character who has survived a fight with Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and other slasher movie mass murderers. Since the killers in such movies are typically unstoppable monsters and permanently destroying them is nearly impossible, the real victory for the Final Girl is the mere fact that she's still alive at the end despite all of the villain's efforts to strangle, crush, stab, impale, club, axe, drown, defenestrate, or decapitate her. Ultimately averted in cases where the Final Girl later falls victim to Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome.

In For Your Eyes Only, Bond destroys the MacGuffin that he and the Russians were competing for. His mission wasn't to claim it, but to deny it to the Russians.

Used as an Exact Words ploy by the Big Bad in The Luck of the Irish, when Kyle bets him that he can beat him at sports. They end up tying, and the villain claims that Kyle lost the bet since he didn't "beat" him.

In Jupiter Ascending, this sums up Kalique's gambit in a nutshell. As the middle child, she seems to be well-off and financially stable. By allowing Jupiter to ascend and protecting her from Titus, she screws over her older brother, who loses his greatest asset by virtue of it being Jupiter's inheritance, and prevents Titus from becoming more powerful by keeping Jupiter out of his hands.

This is how the airport battle in Captain America: Civil War ends. Team Captain America is trying to get to Siberia to apprehend Helmut Zemo when Team Iron Man shows up to arrest all of them. The two sides square off with neither gaining an advantage. Eventually, Team Cap decides that Falcon, Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch, and Ant Man will Hold the Line and allow themselves to be captured while Cap and Bucky (who were the ones Team Iron Man was after in the first place) escape so that someone will be able to stop Zemo.

This was a repeated strategy of Zandramas in The Malloreon. The theory was: before the Choice could be made, certain conditions had to be fulfilled by both sides. If Zandramas killed someone on the good side who hadn't fulfilled their condition, she'd probably win by default. The same was true for the other side; Poledra points out that if the Child of Light gets to the Place That Is No More and found no Child of Dark waiting for him, he'd probably win by default.

This is mentioned by Luck, er, TheLady, during her game against Fate in the Discworld novel Interesting Times. It makes sense because Fate is pursuing a specific outcome while Luck just wants to mess things up so there are a lot more ways for her to win.

In Going Postal, Moist's Post Office "wins" the race against the clacks company not by actually sending their message faster, but by changing the clacks message so that the clacks owner comes under suspicion and the race is called off.

This is how the diamond in Charles Benoit's Relative Danger is finally disposed of, with a slight twist—none of the people trying to get it actually have the right to it, and the main character knows he's outclassed, so he publicly reveals its existence and location, letting the antagonist take credit for discovering it, but denying him the ability to legally claim it. (It winds up in a museum.)

In Dragon Bones, while Ward first pursues the goal of convincing everyone that he is, in fact, not stupid, and was only Obfuscating Stupidity, that changes, and in the end, it is all about thwarting the villain's plan.

In Area 7, Mother describes a war game Scarecrow had been involved in where he'd managed to evade the enemy until the time limit ran out. Scarecrow didn't hurt the opposing team in any way, but he denied them a clear victory for the first time, which had infuriated the opposing team.

In near-future military thriller Victoria, this is the strategy the secessionists in the incipient Northern Confederation successfully employ against the US federal government. Realistically, their rag-tag rebel forces naturally have no chance whatever to, say, march on Washington and demand its surrender—but they don't really need to, either. All they have to do is to hold out and deny the Federal authorities control of New England, in order to win the war on the moral level: when the rest of the country sees that the Administration is unable to hinder secession, sufficiently many of the other states also jump on the bandwagon, declaring their own independence in response to decades of Federal abuses, thus leaving the government largely powerless.

In William Prochnau's Trinity's Child, this is why the Soviets launch a limited nuclear strike on the United States. The Soviet premier explains that they can no longer afford the conventional arms race with America, so a limited nuclear war is necessary to damage the U.S. enough to deny the Americans a clear win of the Cold War. As a concession, the premier notifies the President that he is willing to accept a U.S. counterstrike that inflicts equal damage on the Soviet Union.

Live Action TV

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Peak Performance" introduces Kolrami, a grand master of the game of Strategema. His first match with Data established that Kolrami is able to beat him; in their second match, Data plays for a draw, eventually causing Kolrami to Rage Quit. At first Data insists that he did not technically defeat Kolrami, but bows to his fellow crewmembers' insistence that he "busted him up."

The first major example was in "Call to Arms", when Starfleet mined the entrance to the wormhole so no new enemy ships could come through, then left the station undefended when the Dominion/Cardasian alliance came to take it over (in order to facilitate taking down said minefield). The reason? Starfleet sent a massive strike force to take advantage of a weakness this created in the Dominion's lines to destroy several ship yards, preventing them from making any new ships.

The Dominion themselves are big fans of this philosophy. They once tried to negotiate a new border that would leave them with several less systems, but give them one they didn't have. That system would have allowed them to make more Ketracel White (the substance that the Jem'Hadar soldiers need to survive). When this was discovered, Starfleet rejected the plan outright.

Used more casually in "Take Me Out to the Holosuite", where the command crew and friends get in a contest with an all-Vulcan crew. The game is baseball, which the Vulcans have been playing heavily but the main crew other than Sisko know nothing about. In the end they have a celebration for scoring a single point instead of suffering the complete curbstomp the racist Vulcan captain was hoping for.

Red Dwarf has an example in an early season episode: Rimmer is playing checkers against a skutter (a small service robot), and has been backed into a position in which he has only one possible move, and then the skutter takes his last piece and wins. Rimmer, however, confidently expects victory, because the skutter is due to leave for its shift fairly soon, thus forfeiting the game, provided Rimmer stretches out his turn long enough.

In the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "Making Friends and Influencing People", SHIELD and HYDRA are both racing to recruit Donnie Gill, a powerful Gifted with the ability to freeze people and objects. While the primary mission is recruitment, both sides have orders to kill Donnie if it means stopping the other side from using him. The difference being that with SHIELD, killing is the absolute last resort only to be used if Donnie joins HYDRA, whereas HYDRA has a strict Join or Die policy. In the end, HYDRA take control of Donnie, and Skye is forced to kill him - essentially, SHIELD wins by denying HYDRA a powerful asset.

At the end of the Doctor Who-episode "Last of the Time Lords", the Doctor once again thwarts the Master's plan, and explains that he's going to keep him prisoner on the TARDIS. However, right as he says that, the Master is shot by Lucy Saxon. Instead of regenerating, the Master chooses to die in the arms of a wildly sobbing Doctor, happy with the fact that the Doctor is once again the Last of His Kind thanks to him.

Professional Wrestling

The "disqualification rule", which specifies that a champion can only lose his title by pinfall or submission, often turns into a form of this trope. A champion will "defend" his title by walking away from the ring (taking a loss by countout) or by intentionally forcing a disqualification (for example, by attacking a referee or using an illegal weapon) — and thus losing the match but keeping the title, as he wasn't pinned or forced to submit. One loss is, of course, considered less important than the storyline glory of being a champion. However, a booker who has a champion do this too often risks having the public turn on the champion, which costs everyone money in the long run. However, when the heel repeatedly uses this tactic to the point of Loophole Abuse, it generally leads to a Reasonable Authority Figure restarting the match with the rule suspended. Or scheduling the rematch as one of the many varieties of Gimmick Matches in which countouts and disqualifications are not a factor.

Beat the Clock challenges, when the fastest win gets a title shot, with either everyone in the match taking part or just one participant, fall under this - if a match goes long enough with a time to beat already set, it'll end when the match can no longer beat the set time; in the later type of tournament, the non-participating competitor picking up a win qualifies as a win for the standing time, regardless of the speed of the match.

The WCW Television Championship had an element of this. The belt had to be won on tv and within a certain time limit. Heel champions would often use this as a way to hold onto the title by holding out long enough not to lose the belt.

Triple H, more or less, TRIED to obliquely claim this in the lead up to Wrestlemania 28: He had technically lost to the Undertaker at Wrestlemania 27, but he walked out under his own power and continued to appear and wrestle (albeit sporadically) throughout the year (2011) while Undertaker was carried out on a stretcher and wasn't seen at all for the rest of the year, ergo he 'really won'. note Undertaker was very displeased by this claim, and as a result Triple H ended up suffering a FAR more crushing defeat at his hands that year.

Sports

This is common in association football where a weaker team going against a much stronger team will usually play more defensively and will aim for a draw instead of trying to win. As well, especially later in the league seasons where points become precious, a draw can be a season-changer.

Regarding the English Premier League, the Arsenal fan takes this one step further than anyone else, as they have their own celebration whenever the day comes that they are mathematically guaranteed to finish ahead of hated rivals Tottenham Hotspur in the table, no matter where in the table that might be. Liverpool suffered this in the 2013/14 season, where they could have won the title, if they hadn't drawn Manchester City in their fixture only days before.

In the 2013/14 season of the UEFA Champions League, Barcelona fans hoped to invoke this trope after their elimination in the quarterfinals while Real Madrid was drawn to confront Bayern Munich in the semifinals.note The reason for this is because, at the time, former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola was leading Bayern Real Madrid won, thus defying the trope.

Also common in Test cricket, where a team that is sufficiently behind in the match will give up all attempts at winning and just play for time, hoping to deny the other team the victory. Given the nature of the sport, this can mean surviving for one or more days.

On a smaller scale; this is a very common strategy in roller derby. If a lead jammer finds herself being outperformed, or is more concerned with preserving a lead than with taking more points, she will often simply call the jam before her opponent hits the pack. She doesn't score any points, but more importantly, neither does her opponent.

Whenever a team loses (specially in either final matches and/or humiliating defeats) the rival team's fandom will celebrate copiously because their hated rival lost, even if the fans' own team wasn't even in the match. One example is with University of Southern California football fans, who even when they're not playing their archrivals UCLA and Notre Dame, still define a "Perfect Day" as a day when USC wins but UCLA and Notre Dame lose.

In the 1968 Harvard-Yale game, Harvard got the ball back with less than four minutes left against undefeated and heavily favored Yale, trailing 29-13. What happened next? Harvard drove down the field, scoring a touchdown with 42 seconds left in the game. The two-point conversion made the score 29-21. Harvard got the ball back on an onside kick (onside kicks hardly ever work). A couple of plays later, as time expired, Harvard scored another touchdown. They then converted another two-point conversion to tie the game, which then ended, as there was no overtime in college football in 1968 (it didn't get universally adopted until 1996). The next day's Harvard Crimson headline read Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.

The 1991 BYU-San Diego State game was a similar situation. BYU entered the game undefeated in Western Athletic Conference play, SDSU (led by future NFL great Marshall Faulk) had one loss, and it was their final conference game. An SDSU win would've given the Aztecs at least a tie for the title, and since they would've beaten BYU head-to-head, they would've earned a bid to the Holiday Bowl (played at their home stadium). SDSU held leads of 45-17 in the third quarter and 52-38 in the fourth, but BYU quarterback Ty Detmer (the 1990 Heisman Trophy winner) led a Miracle Rally that ended up cutting the lead to 52-51 late in the game. Rather than risk missing a two-point conversion, BYU kicked a PAT and the game ended as a 52-52 tie, but the SDSU collapse made BYU the de facto victor.note BYU clinched the WAC title outright the next week by beating Utah.

The page image shows the headlines of the New York Post, which is said to have been inspired from the Harvard-Yale game, when the United States held England 1-1 in the group stage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The United States would go on to top their group ahead of England on goals scored.

Just to clarify this point: As is troped on This Very Wiki, Soccer-Hating Americans are very much Truth in Television, and in the World Cup, the team was often seen as a joke. And of course, Americans get a lot of ribbing for being bad from England and one of the big reasons Americans do not like football is because it frequently ends in draws. A draw against England was a victory in America because they could finally say to Britain "just as good as you" while it was a major defeat in Britain because they lost to the Joke Character of the World Cup and the one whose country couldn't bother to care about the outcome. Most British papers did cover the draw with a tone reserved for exceptionally bad losses.

And of course, a good part of the reason the game ended in a draw was because England goalkeeper Robert Green mishandled a shot from Clint Dempsey and dropped the ball, which proceeded to bounce into the goal and tie the game.

This is true of Boxing, similar to Professional Wresting above. The Challenger has to actually beat the Champion — a draw or any other outcome causes the Champion to retain the belt. This is why Rocky (1976) ends with Balboa losing — both men are down for the count but Creed is the Champion.

In timed sporting events, a team with a large enough lead does not need to score again, but rather merely prevent the other team from scoring and run out the clock. With a large enough lead, you don't even need to stop the opposing team from scoring; you just need to slow them down so that they run out of time.

The infamous Formula One's rivalry between Aryton Senna and Alain Prost in 1989-1990 seasons ends with the trope and endless controversies. In 1989 Suzuka, Prost and Senna collided, deliberately giving Prost a world title. In 1990 at the very same curcuit, Senna crashed out Prost, handing Senna a world title.

It's not unknown for teams in various sports, who are certainly not going to make the playoffs, to play very defensively for the tie (and the lesser points thus awarded) when facing a team who needs all the points they can to make the playoffs, especially if that team is a longtime rival, just to spite them.

Just about any multinational football tournament sees this happen- fans of a country that gets eliminated seem to care less about the loss and more that their country's historical rival got eliminated first.

In rugby union, the Six Nations. Whenever a team with 4 wins and chasing a Grand Slam fails to win its last match, the other nations celebrate. Having won the most times, England in general also receive this treatment, as shown in an advert for the 2012 Six Nations, which was pulled before it was to be broadcast.

The Six Nations. It's not about who you want to win it's about who you want to lose.

In the 2017 NFL season, the Cleveland Browns finished 0-16 (the second time since the 2008 Detroit Lions that a team lost all 16 games). When they started their 2018 season, they played their divisional rivals, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and ended in a 21-21 tie. This was monumental for the Browns because: 1.) This was the first time since 2004 that their season opener wasn't a loss, and 2.) This was also the first time since December 2016 that they didn't lose a game, thus ending their 2-year losing streak (the Browns would end their winless streak in week 3 when they defeated the New York Jets 21-17).

Tabletop Games

One of a number of ways you can earn a punch in the face when playing Warhammer 40k is to rig your army so that you can deny your opponent every objective on the board in one (i.e. the last) turn. It's a bit of a crapshoot, considering that objectives only constitute victory in 2/3 of games, and the game has an equal chance of ending on turns 5, 6, or 7, but when the dice are going your way (or your opponent's way) this can be a very cheap way to secure a draw. In a tournament setting, this can knock you straight out of any kind of running, as tournaments tend to reward not only victory, but utter annihilation of your opponent. Getting even one draw will likely cost you the whole thing.

Some of the older armies, such as the Eldar, practically live off stunts like this, and would not survive the codex creep were it not for their ability to pull it off on command.

Because of how objectives work in 5th edition note only Troops choices within 3", barring vehicles and other specific exceptions can take objectives, but any enemy unit within 3" can deny a claim to them, many objective-based games can end in draws. The "Capture and Control" mission of 5th edition is especially egregious for this because there are a total of two objectives on the table which must be placed one in each player's deployment zone, but without any other restrictions (so long as both objectives are 18" away from each other). It took power gamers all of about two seconds to realize they could park their objective on their board edge. Five to seven turns later, barring utter annihilation of one player, these games just about always end in draws.

Two factions can do this in the Dune board game (inspired from Frank Herbert's eponymous novels) : the Fremen and the Guild. The Fremen, being the native inhabitants of Arrakis, win the game by default if no one else does since it means they have successfully defended their homeworld and their culture from external threats. The Guild wins if no one else wins and if a set of additional conditions (meaning that no major faction is in position to control the Spice market) are fulfilled. The Bene Gesserit can pull a similar trick, but it is closer to things going All According to Plan.

It's very possible to do this in 7 Wonders, which requires that you build up victory points that are only calculated at the end of the game. At the end of each "play", you pass your cards to another player, so that everyone, in theory, gets a more or less equal chance to play every card. But if you see one of your opponents working on a specific strategy, you can play a card that gives you little to no benefit, simply to deny them the ability to profit off their strategy. It's risky (you're essentially screwing up your own strategy to mess with theirs), but it can pay off. It's especially useful if your opponent is pursuing a technology chain, since the points values for those grow exponentially.

In most rules for casino-level Blackjack, the house has a few edges to ensure more wins. If the player busts (exceeds 21), regardless of the House's hand, the House wins. This compensates for the increased payout for a player's 2-card 21 and various other moves the player can do (such as double down, split, and stand on hands less than 17).

Standard Blackjack returns the wager to the player in a "push", or a hand where the player's total equals the dealer's total and neither has busted. Some variants of Blackjack give other advantages to the player but compensate by awarding pushes to the house.

In Chess, if one side only has a king, there are quite a few combinations of pieces that can force checkmate. However, if their opponent doesn't have enough pieces, or just makes a mistake, the losing side can sometimes maneuver into a stalemate. Like other draws, a stalemate is counted as half a win, and drawing a much stronger opponent is considered a great accomplishment.

In the BattleTech universe, the overuse of these tactics by the Great Houses led directly to a precipitous technological decline during the Succession Wars. "If I can't have technology X or weapon Y, then no one can!" Cue factory after factory being destroyed, damaged, or sabotaged, and the few scientists who could've understood the blueprints to rebuild them being ruthlessly assassinated. Though in hindsight, much of the usage of these tactics was secretly encouraged by the Church Militant Comstar, in order to deliberately starve the Houses of the technology they needed to wage war.

In the Discworld: Ankh-Morpork board game the Sam Vimes player wins if the game ends without anyone else fulfilling their victory condition.

Video Games

Many multiplayer online games include an "attack/defend" mode where one team tries to break into/capture/destroy the enemy base somehow, and if they can't before time runs out the defenders win. An example would be Payload from Team Fortress 2.

In Halo: Reach, the primary objective of the initial Covenant strike force was to secure a Forerunner artifact before it fell into human hands. At which they fail and the UNSC learns about the location of the first Halo. However, the main invasion fleet arrives a few days later and successfully wipes out the largest center of human population outside of Earth, single-handedly scoring the most important victory of the entire war.

In the Mario Party series, a player who winning by a wide margin may purposely work against his partner(s) in a 2 vs 2 or 3 vs 1 mini-game because if he is winning already, he can still win the whole game by making sure the other players don't win, even if he technically lost the mini-game.

In both The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games, sometimes Maple runs into Link causing them to both drop several items and a mini-game where they race to collect the items. If the screen they ran into each other on had a lot of deep water that the items fall into it and disappear, even if the total value of the items Link collect is better than that Maple collects, Maple still counts the items that disappeared as if she collected them.

Many games such as Gears of War have multiplayer modes without infinite respawns where the objective is to kill everyone on the opposing team. It's common for the last player left alive on a team to run and hide in order to wait out the clock and force a draw, rather than risk the chance of the other team winning. Some games have tried to combat this by awarding victory to the team with more players left alive after the clock runs out.

PlanetSide 2's Alert system creates server-wide missions to take over as much territory on a continent as possible. However, if one (of three) factions is overpopulated, they'll often end up owning the vast majority of the territory by simply overrunning defenders with sheer numbers; particularly common with the Vanu Sovereignty on the Emerald server, where the Terran Republic and New Conglomerate will occasionally purposely abandon bases to each other in order to force a tie in order to deny the VS a victory.

In competitive World of Tanks league play, a standard tactic in the last minute or so of a round when one team has only one or two tanks left, is outnumbered (or if the other team significantly outweighs the survivors in terms of tank size), and the team that's stronger doesn't have enough time left to capture the base, is for the weaker team to run. If there's even one of their tanks left alive when time runs out, they've forced a draw. For this reason, the tiebreaker match in championships is a king-of-the-hill style match which forces a winner: if the attacking team (usually the one that has the least amount of points in the match) can't either destroy all the enemy tanks or capture the base before time runs out, the defenders win.

Late in Tales of the Abyss, Sync, while encountering the heroes, taunts them about how they haven't found the Jewel of Lorelei (which, unbeknownst to anyone at this point, is currently inside Luke). When Luke fires back and says the villains haven't found it yet, Sync replies that if no one finds it, his side will keep the upper hand.

Meta example from the Fire Emblem series: the Spiteful A.I. enemy wins if they kill a single one of your soldiers, even if you were just about to accomplish your objective, because, let's face it, you're gonna Rage Quit and restart the chapter because you love your quirky soldiers won't you?

Similarly to the Federation Force example above, Dissidia Final Fantasy (2015) will result in everyone losing if the time runs out. While not exactly this trope in multiplayer, it is most certainly this in offline play as one loss in arcade mode sends you right back to the start.

In the Empires spinoffs of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors, one of the conditions for losing when invading another kingdom is to time to expire. If, on the other hand, the player is defending their own kingdom from invasion, they have a secondary victory condition in allowing time to expire; so long as they do not die or allow their own main base to be taken, they can win without having to take the enemy's main base.

The player can do this to the Rebels in FTL: Faster Than Light: If the Rebel Flagship is destroyed at roughly the same time as the player's ship (but before the point in the player ship's "hull destroyed" animation where the game declares a Game Over), the game will be considered cleared. Justified, in that destroying the Flagship means the leaders of the Rebels are dead and the Federation claims swift victory as a result, and the overall goal of the game is "defeat the Rebels," not "defeat the Rebels and self-preserve."

In Dinobot's final episode in Beast Wars, he destroys Megatron's golden disk, thus denying its secrets to the Maximals but also preventing the Predacons from exploiting it.

Subverted because Megatron saved a piece of the disk and it helps him a lot when Ravage shows up to arrest him on behalf of the Tripredacus Council. The saved piece contains a message left behind by G1 Megatron about a plan to change the past so Optimus Prime's team of Autobots wouldn't be around to stop the Decepticons in the original series. Ravage is a Decepticon who swore loyalty to G1 Megatron.

Used in Xiaolin Showdown where Master Fung teaches the warriors that they can't get the jade elephant from him if it's no longer an elephant, but a pile of jade dust instead. Omi puts this lesson to use by sending a teleporting Shen-Gong-Wu to the Earth's core rather than let any of the villains have it.

Master Fung: Your goal was to win. Mine was merely not to lose.

In Hey Arnold! Grampa was able to win a Chinese checkers game in a tie, though he won it because he went home with the trophy. The fact that his opponent (and long-time rival) reacted so badly to the tie also helps to the perceived victory.

Gravity Falls: Dipper and Mabel's goal when they agreed to help Stan's candidacy was to prevent Bud from winning. They're sad about Stan being disqualified but at least they don't have to worry about Gideon receiving a pardon because Bud didn't win either.

Angela Anaconda: Subverted. When Angela loses a bicycle race, Gina tries to comfort her with the fact Nanette also lost. Angela says it would normally be enough but she counted on the $200 cash prize to make up for losing her father's new wallet and the $200 he kept inside it.

Miles from Tomorrowland: In "Double Trouble", Commander Nemmex tries to steal a cloaking device and the heroes decide to destroy it to stop him.

Real Life (Wars)

As mentioned above, the battle of Thermopylae during the Greco-Persian wars: It (and its sister sea battle at Artemisium) were intended to be holding operations to stall the much larger Persian army and fleet until the Greek city-states could raise their levies and prepare for a counter-attack. Both were technically Greek defeats both tactically and strategically (they only succeeded at stalling the Persians for less than a week and Athens fell as a result), although the over-extension of the Persian fleet in trying to hunt down the Greek one ultimately led to the battle of Salamis, which turned the face of the war.

The Alamo: A small group of Texans hold out in an old mission. The Mexicans win, but lose three times more fighters than the Texans, and stall long enough fighting them that the rest of the Texans have enough time to regroup and prepare for the final battle.

The War of 1812: The war ended in an expensive military stalemate, with no changes in territory and no meaningful concessions on any side; while the impressment of American sailors ended, the cause for the blockade that the sailors had been taken for was over. This resulted in all major sides in the conflict claiming victory due to this trope - the US claimed victory because they maintained their territorial integrity and the British were no longer kidnapping American sailors, the Canadians claimed victory because the US failed to conquer Canada, and the British claimed victory because they had successfully prevented the US from helping France during the Napoleonic Wars. The only clear losers were the Native Americans, who lost their British sponsors. This had major positive long-term ramifications for the US; because the British failed to win, they failed to curb American expansion. Because the Native Americans lost, there was no one left to prevent further American expansion. As a result, the US eventually became one of the largest and most powerful countries in the world, surpassing the UK and making further wars with them untenable.

Antietam: The Union held the field at the end of this bloody battle, but suffered greater losses than the Confederacy. Despite this, by claiming the battle as a victory, Lincoln was able to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which changed the whole character of the war in the Union's favor.

On the immediate strategic level, Antietam was a victory because it stopped the Southern invasion of the North, forcing the invaders to retreat and preventing them from taking Washington. In that respect it is very much comparable to the Peninsular Campaign and Seven Days Battles before Richmond earlier in 1862 and to the Gettysburg campaign of 1863. In both cases the defending forces forced a retreat on the attackers while sustaining greater losses themselves. Had the Army of Northern Virginia succeeded in taking Washington in the Antietam campaign, that would have made it much more likely that France and Britain would have recognized the Confederacy as an independent nation.

Gettysburg also can be seen as a good example of this trope, even though the South's chance of victory were smaller in 1863 than in 1862. The Southern invasion of Pennsylvania was beaten back, but the Army of the Potomac sustained the heavier losses and Meade did not dare to attack the Army of Northern Virginia as it retreated south. However, at the same time Vicksburg fell and the Confederacy was cut in two as the Union forces brought the entire length of the Mississipi under its control. During the entire war there was a certain pattern that while the CSA was quite successful in Northeastern Virginia - even making a few attempts to take Washington, D. C. - this was more than offset by Union victories in the other war theaters. A big problem both with the way Jefferson Davis and Lee planned the war and with many accounts of the war after it was over was that too much importance was attached to the war in Virginia and not enough to the Western fronts.

This trope was the win condition of the South - whilst the North had to actively defeat them, the South only had to hold out long enough for the North to sue for peace due to war weariness, or to be recognised as an independent nation by Britain and France (the superpowers of the age). Both of these came close to happening at different times during the war.

Also essentially the win condition for the North - While the Army of Northern Virginia had repeatedly defeated the Union Army of the Potomac by inflicting greater losses and stalling their advances, once Grant took command he simply accepted the losses and advanced anyhow, eventually bringing Lee's army to bay.

The latter condition is why the Emancipation Proclamation did so much damage - suddenly, if Britain or France recognized the Confederacy, they'd be supporting slavery, something neither nation was ever going to do. Now the South had to force the North to give up without any hope of outside assistance, a much chancier proposition.

The American Revolution was fought with much the same in mind, only it worked that time. Almost certainly where the rebs got the idea.

This is the way French citizens see the Second World War and the Resistance: there was the defeat in the battle of France, and Hitler going to Paris, and the Vichy Regime, but there were French who never surrendered between '40 and '45, who hurt the Nazi war machine, saved the lives of three-fourths of the French Jews, and fought alongside the Allies until the victory.

Didn't hurt the Nazi war machine much, though. Vichy France was a huge provider of war materiel for the Axis cause, and their government collaborated more enthusiastically than the Germans had even asked for in a failed effort to gain German respect (with the sole exception of the Vichy navy, which eventually scuttled itself rather than hand over their ships for German use). And while many French Jews were merely persecuted rather than executed, German Jews who'd fled to France for sanctuary were put into internment camps by the old Republican government, and cheerfully sent to the death camps by the succeeding Vichy government. The Free French forces do get some credit here, but they had nothing to do with the plight of the Jews of France.

That being said, once the Free French started taking over they saw a Phoenix-like rebirth of the French military, to the point where there were nearly as many French divisions by the end of the war as there were Americans (at least in the Rhine) and they played a key role in hammering the final nails in Hitler's coffin.

A stronger case can be made for the French Navy winning because Germany didn't accomplish its goal of absorbing them. If Germany had done this, than the Axis navies in Europe would have been strong enough to potentially oppose the Allied navy. So the French just blew their navy up when the Germans tried to take it, essentially ensuring an Axis naval defeat.

Finland in WWII. The nation managed to preserve her independence, freedom and Western lifestyle and not succumb to forced integration with the USSR and Communism. Finland was never conquered and never occupied, and her economy quickly revived after the disaster of the war. There is even a specific word for this trope in the Finnish language, torjuntavoitto, roughly translating to "victory by making the aggressor to fail".

Unternehmen Zitadelle, or the Battle of Kursk (July 1943), has been portrayed as one by German generals in their post-war memoirs. They prefer to think of it as a mere failure to succeed in encircling the well-prepared Soviet force in the Kursk salient, rather than the first in a series of non-stop defeats that followed from the capture of the Germans' Vyazma salient in the north (while they were still busy down south with Zitadelle) and ended with the Germans' Panzer forces utterly annihilated after six months of non-stop campaigning. note Oh, sure, they managed to replace the tanks they'd lost. But the experienced tankmen were all dead or (far more often, because German tanks were harder to destroy outright, but they were as easily disabled as anyone else's) in Siberia.

The Korean War: The Chinese and North Koreans didn't succeed in uniting Korea. The United Nations (mostly Americans, with about twelve percent being from other allied nations like France, Australia, and Turkey) and South Korea only "won" because they stopped the advance of communism and inflicted incredibly high casualties against the enemy, but in reality at the end of the war everything was pretty much status quo. Except for the 2.8 million people killed due to North Korean aggression.

Technically the war is still ongoing as no peace treaty was ever signed between North and South Korea, and China and the United Nations never declared war on each other. Nor did the United States actually declare war on North Korea, or China on South Korea.

Conquering North Korea was only a secondary goal for America and her allies- the primary goal was to save South Korea, which they succeeded at. In fact, by advancing as far as the Yalu, and threatening to cross over into China, MacArthur far exceeded his actual mandate. China's goal also wasn't conquest of South Korea, but rather keeping North Korea as a buffer zone, which they also succeeded at, albeit at a huge cost to human life. The real losers here were the North Koreans.

Basically everyone other than North Korea won because North Korea didn't.

In more practical terms, South Korea won in the long run by staying out of North Korean control. While South Korea has grown in a fully modern nation with access to proper utilities and services, North Korea has been left behind technologically and militarily. Satellite images of North Korea during the night show the country as a nation shrouded in darkness compared to the city lights that come from the neighboring countries of China and South Korea. It's so bad that North Korea is considered a "failed state" by a few political science textbooks. In essence, by simply surviving, South Korea won by being able to gain more amenities.

The Battle of Jutland in World War I. The British lost more ships, but "won" because the German High Seas Fleet never left its territorial waters again.

The British fleet was the last line, the Germans would have decisively won the entire war shortly after if they hadn't been stopped there.

A decisive German victory was never really in the cards considering the numerical superiority of the Royal Navy, and that is without taking into account the navies of the other Allied nations and the United States, which would join the Alliance in 1917. However, the High Seas Fleet did leave German territorial waters on a few occasions after Jutland (which the Germans consider(ed) a victory) and was e. g. able to mount amphibious operations on the Baltic coast against Russia, contributing to Russia losing its Baltic provinces and Finland.

Similar example (again from the American Civil War): The Battle of the Wilderness. The Confederates were able to inflict horrendous casualties and stall the Union advance; General Grant responded by simply going around Lee's army, reasoning that he could take the losses and Lee couldn't.

In the Battle of Waterloo, the Prussian forces arrived on Napoleon's right flank, after he'd already been fighting for hours against Wellington and the other allies. He'd actually already defeated them at Ligny, but failed to destroy enough of them to take them out of the equation.

While Operation Barbarossa in WW2 is often held to be this, with the claim that the Russians only won by burning everything in the Germans' path, just like they did against Napoleon, it did achieve two very important things that are often overlooked by the stereotype: (1) Attrition is a valid strategy, and the massive losses incurred by the Germans was simply something their logistics (already stretched at that point) could not keep up with; and (2) their own warmaking capability was still largely intact, making them much more capable of continuing to fight the war than the Germans.

The battle of Russians against Napoleon at Borodino falls under this trope. The Russians lost far more men than the French, but since they had at least managed to hold their ground for awhile against a stronger force, it was demoralizing for the French, which contributed to the unraveling of military order once the French took Moscow.

To clarify, neither side won the Borodino battle. Napoleon's goal was to destroy the Russian army, while the Russian had defence of Mscow as their prime objective. Both sides did not succeed. The whole war, however, is a clear example of this trope since Napoleon was planning to quickly achieve victory and did not care much about the supply lines. Thus, he was forced to retreat from Russia.

The Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese failed to outright defeat the American forces. They never won any single battle in the field and suffered far more casualties than their American counterpart, but the war slowly deteriorated in terms of public support back in the States and the US withdrew all their forces from Vietnam. However, this trope is averted when North Vietnam went against South Vietnam where the South was steamrolled by the North. At a conference after the war, an American officer insisted that the NVA and VC had never won on the battlefield. His Vietnamese counterpart replied, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant." Simply put, there were limits to how much America was willing to sacrifice to achieve victory. The same was not true of the North Vietnamese.

Henry Kissinger noted with regards to this war and guerilla warfare in general that "the guerilla wins if he does not lose; the regular army loses unless it wins."

To be fair to South Vietnam, it's hard to defend one's country successfully when one's biggest ally not only pulls out, but cuts off the supplies you're still dependent on.

Suppressing rebellions is also subject to a cost-benefit analysis on the part of The Empire. When the Romans tried to outlaw circumcision, a rebellion broke out among the Jews. Militarily, the Romans won the war, but doing so was so much trouble that they decided to let the Jews practice their religion freely anyway. The same thing happened in the Canadian Rebellions of 1837 in which the demand for responsible government was a primary cause. Both insurrections were crushed military by the British colonial forces, but when Lord Durham was sent to investigate the causes of the trouble, he recommended that the colonies be given responsible government so as to avoid future trouble, which was eventually carried out.

British editors at the English-language Wikipedia adamantly refuse to label the War of Jenkins' Ear (1739-1748) a British defeat, pointing that there wasn't British land lost to Spain and that the war was subsummed into the War of the Austrian Succession from 1740 anyway. Nevermind that the war was started by the British government, with the explicit aim of conquering Spanish colonies, and that the British invasions of New Granada and Cuba (deemed easy at the time of war declaration) were soundly defeated. Plus, the side backed by Britain in the War of Austrian Succession (Austria) lost land to Spain and her ally, Prussia.

This was basically the approach of the Byzantine Empire for much of its history. They were well aware of their lack of resources and troublesome strategic position, sandwiched between Muslims to South and East, and barbarians to West and North. Byzantine's goal was, more often than not, simply to outlast their enemies until the latter simply gave up, avoiding direct conflict and using harrassment as a way of minimizing their own casualties.

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